“I just-” Grimacing, I try to swallow. I can taste something coppery, I don’t know if I bit my lip or he squeezed the blood from my throat. “I wanted to see you.”
Growling under his breath, he gently touches the back of my head, and his fingers come back smeared in blood. He scoops me up and strides over to a black BMW in the far corner of the club’s parking lot. Over his shoulder, I can see the five bodies cooling on the grimy street.
“What about those-” A car turns into the alleyway just as he turns the corner.
“They’ll be taken care of,” he says indifferently. Settling me into the passenger seat, he leans over to fasten my seatbelt, and my eyes close. There it is… he still smells like a pine forest, something sharp like citrus, and underneath it all, the smoky notes of gunpowder. A bolt of longing rips through my chest.
Am I in shock? That must be it. Sniffing the man who just took out five human beings? Well, the Albanians were complete bastards, so no one’s going to miss them. But still. What is wrong with me?
I grab his arm as he starts the car. “Wait! I’m working, I can’t-”
With an irritable sigh, he pulls out his phone. “Gregor?Privet.You know who this is.” Alexi gently runs a finger along the bruises blooming on my neck like black and purple flowers. “Your employee Lucya is very sick. I’m taking her home.”
“No!” I cough again, “I need this shift.”
He raises a brow at me and I flush, painfully aware of my wrinkled server uniform.
“You’ll collect her tips for her tonight, Gregor. Very good.Do svidaniya,goodbye.”
Handing me a bottle of water as he pulls into traffic, Alexi glances at me. “Drink some, it will help the swelling in your throat.”
“Thank you,” I croak. This was not how I envisioned seeing Alexi Turgenev again. I’ve had a million scenarios play out in my mind, like being dressed up in a gorgeous gown at one of the many holiday balls in St. Petersburg. He would see me across the room and realize that I’d grown up, that I was no longer the child he remembered. He’d walk across the room, staring at me the entire way and then…
As it turns out, he didn’t remember me at all.
“Um, where are we going?”
“I’m taking you to a clinic,” he says, “I want to make sure there’s no real damage.”
Wincing as I swallow, I ask, “Were you really going to kill me?”
“I try to avoid killing women. But youwerea witness.” He glances at me as we stop for a red light. The light plays over the sharp lines of his face, the red bathing him in a bloody glow. There’s a spray of gore across one prominent cheekbone.
“You have some…” I gesture lamely at his face, “some blood there.” With an irritable sigh, he opens the center console, pulling out a package of wet wipes. “Oh, that’s good, you have a murder cleanup kit.”
Swiping the rest of the blood from his face, Alexi ignores me.
Chapter Five
In which the “getting to know you after I almost killed you” stage is a bit awkward.
Alexi…
Sweet Lucya Dubrovina.Kolibri.
The little girl I remember had endless energy, fluttering from place to place so often that I nicknamed herKolibri,the hummingbird. My older brother Dmitri, who is not funny and also a fucking piece of shit, laughed, saying that Lucya’s “fat ass and stubby legs weren’t exactly hummingbird material.”
Fortunately, she’d been too far away to hear the asshole ridiculing her.
But here and now,thisis Lucya? She’s tall, too lean, but beautiful, even in her shabby black server’s uniform and huddled against the dirty brick wall. Her dark hair was pulled up in an untidy ponytail, and her green eyes were huge over the hand covering her mouth… That was the moment I knew who she was, it was the color of her eyes. No one else had that translucent green shade, like sea glass on the beach.
Frowning, I watch the bruises darkening around her throat. “What were you doing out there? You know better than that.”
“It didn’t occur to me that you’d lured the Albanians out there to kill them all,” she says sharply. “But given your job description, I should have.”
“Why did you follow them? Do you have any sense of self-preservation? I saw those fuckers harassing you. I would have killed them just for that ass grab. They’re lucky it was quick.”
“I just-”
